ArticlePLoS biology2021
Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US biomedicine.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anchored and Propagated Updating Within Pseudoscientific Belief Systems.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Three things we can do now to reduce the risk of avian influenza spillovers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Public attitudes towards social media field experiments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Fragile science.mBio · 2024Article
- Razor sharp: The role of Occam's razor in science.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2023Article
- COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic: lessons learnt for other neglected diseases and future threats.BMJ global health · 2023Review
- Anti-science conspiracies pose new threats to US biomedicine in 2023.FASEB bioAdvances · 2023Article
- Understanding motivations and deterrents for COVID-19 vaccination among US working adults: A mixed method approach.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2022Article
- Review
- Fake or not? Automated detection of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation in social networks and digital media.Computational and mathematical organization theory · 2022Article
- Authority Brings Responsibility: Feedback from Experts Promotes an Overweighting of Health-Related Pseudoscientific Beliefs.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Trust in COVID-19 public health information.Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2022Article
- Age-Specific Mortality During the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic and Life Expectancy Changes in the United States and Peer Countries, 1980-2020.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2022Article
- Communicating science and protecting scientists in a time of political instability.Trends in molecular medicine · 2022Article
- Darwin's illegitimate children: How body language experts undermine Darwin's legacy.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- America's deadly flirtation with antiscience and the medical freedom movement.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2021Article
- Specialty Grand Challenge for Brain Disease Mechanisms.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2021Article
- Vaccinating cassandra.EClinicalMedicine · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The United States witnessed an unprecedented politicization of biomedical science starting in 2015 that has exploded into a complex, multimodal anti-science empire operating through mass media, political elections, legislation, and even health systems. Anti-science activities now pervade the daily lives of many Americans, and threaten to infect other parts of the world. We can attribute the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from COVID-19, measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases to anti-science. The acceleration of anti-science activities demands not only new responses and approaches but also international coordination. Vaccines and other biomedical advances will not be sufficient to halt COVID-19 or future potentially catastrophic illnesses, unless we simultaneously counter anti-science aggression.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.